What is Membership Extras?
Membership Extras is designed to be a companion extension for organisations that use CiviCRM for membership. It provides comprehensive functionality to support payment in instalments, membership periods and order management. There are also several companion extensions for Drupal that support complex self service renewal and upgrade management via webforms. For more information see the blog post here:
What does Membership Extra's currently do?
Membership fee in Instalments
Whilst CiviCRM allows you to have memberships that can have different durations (eg. monthly, annual, lifetime) CiviCRM doesn’t support actual payment by instalments. This is where an organisation will want to offer a membership that has a different duration to the payment duration. For example an annual membership that is paid in monthly or quarterly instalments. With Membership Extra’s you can!
Memberships in arrears
CiviCRM’s default handling of members being in “arrears” only supports a few use cases (specifically where members either do not renew at all) or where they do not pay before a grace period elapses. In order to really support payment by instalments we have extended the membership status rules, to also be able to change the status of a membership when a payment relating to the membership is overdue, so you can track members in arrears (and email them automatically!) before finally ending their membership benefits.
Offline auto-renewal
CiviCRM has support for many payment processors, including several Direct Debit payment processors. With these “online” payment processors, when the membership comes to renew, the logic is actually managed by the payment processor in order to renew the membership and take next years payment. CiviCRM doesn’t however have any functionality for memberships where the payment is “offline” i.e. some Direct Debit processes or where you invoice clients in advance of receiving the payment. With Membership extras CiviCRM now fully supports offline automated renewal including sending email notifications with invoices for payment. We also have created a new offline batch direct debit export module which allows for full management of high volume direct debits through export processes.
WHAT Will it do soon?
MEMBERSHIP PERIODS (COMING SOON)
CiviCRM currently only records a single start date and end date for each membership throughout full history of the membership. Each period of membership, when it starts and ends are not accounted for.
With Membership Extras, any membership sign-up or renewal will create a new membership period recording the effective duration of the sign-up or renewal. You can expand any membership record to see all the period records including their start date, end date and status.
There will also be some enhancement shipped with this feature to allow better automated control over the benefit delivery for membership.
SUBSCRIPTION MANAGEMENT (COMING SOON)
This will allow staff to modify a members benefits during the current membership period - upgrading, downgrading or adding add-ons as needed. These will all flow through as part of the same billing order as the previous membership - i.e. as part of the same recurring contribution and hence will all be kept on the same invoice. This will lower transaction costs for organisations and tidy up billing processes.
INTEGRATES with:
Direct Debit for Membership Extras- a companion CiviCRM extension that allows organisations to follow standard auddis processes for direct debit.
Webform CiviCRM Membership Extras - a companion Drupal module that brings Drupal webform support for all the extra membership functionality the extension provides.
Webform Direct Debit for Membership Extras - a companion Drupal module that brings the webform support for the Direct Debit extension.
How do I get Membership Extras?
Membership Extras is designed to work with CiviCRM 4.7.x or 5.x plus. If you are on an earlier version of CiviCRM, you will need to upgrade your site first. If you would like assistance with this then please feel free to contact us at hello@compucorp.co.uk and we would be pleased to help.
If your CiviCRM is already on CiviCRM 4.7.x or 5.x plus and this is the first time you use an extension, please see Here for full instructions and information on how to set and configure extensions.
If you are using Drupal and you would like to use Membership Extras to have memberships with instalments created by Webform CiviCRM, you can simply download and install the companion Drupal module and your all set!
